The National Security Agency's recruiting department posted what
seemed to be a load of gibberish on Twitter Monday, causing
Twitter users to speculate whether the NSA's recruiting officers
were drunk or accidentally posted a pocket tweet. It turns out
the tweet is a coded message.

For the untrained eye, the letters look like they were placed in
a random jumble. However, a cryptographer will notice that the
tweet does not look like it was made by someone smashing on the
keyboard. Each letter block has exactly 12 letters, except for
the third block, which has a question mark that could indicate
an extra clue, and the last block, which has eight letters and a
period.

Alas, for those of you who are hoping it was a special set of
instructions for secret agents, the cryptic tweet is actually
part of the NSA's campaign to hire cryptographers and would-be
code-breakers.

Looking closely at the tweet, one will find that certain
letters, such as p, i and c, appear more frequently than others.
This suggests that the code used a simple substitution cypher
where each letter of the alphabet is swapped for another. In
this case, t was used for w in the encrypted tweet, p for a, f
for n, and c for t. The first four letters "tpfc" translates
into "want."

Guessing what the other letters correspond to might take an
experienced cryptographer half an hour of decoding, but a simple
online tool can take only a few seconds to try thousands of
letter substitutions. Twitter user Daniel Shealey referred to
Edwin Olson's Quipquip, which took only six seconds to break the
code, although with a small error.

The message reads: "Want to know what it takes to work at NSA?
Check back each month to explore careers essential to protect
our nation."

NSA confirmed that it is the source of the message.

"NSA is known as the code makers and code breakers. As part of
our recruitment efforts to attract the best and the brightest,
we will post mission-related coded tweets on Mondays in the
month of May," writes NSA spokesperson Marci Green Miller.

Anticlimactic, yes, but at least it wasn't "Don't forget to
drink your Ovaltine!"

This is not the first time NSA has used unusual recruitment
strategies. In 2011, the national spy agency, along with other
federal agencies, descended upon Las Vegas to attend the annual
Defcon hacker conference looking to hire around 1,500
"cybersecurity experts."

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